I always think of Dear Esther as the future of landscape paintings.

This work, rather, approaches us saying it is an 'interactive still life painting' and utterly fails to capture what a still life is. What an absurd notion that 'throwing things over' is a digital adaptation of traditional art. It is a digital lack of understanding of art, presented through the technical knowledge of a grown man and the intellect of a 3-year-old child.

Sorry if I sounded facetious. But I do think that the problem is unrestrained capitalism, rather than capitalism as such.

By which I mean, I see the great advantages of private ownership, creation of goods for profit, competition in markets and voluntary exchange. The problem with capitalism in the extreme liberal sense is that a corporation can use world-wide funds to 'outbuy' a local space, or that someone can never rise high enough to receive the chances capitalism offers; or that a single person can be thought of as 'no value' within a larger system. But I think these are social problems which need social solutions (government, &c). I do not think you can think of any system which could replace capitalism without inducing more problems. Will you remove private property? Prohibit the accumulation of wealth? Will my company be government-run and will I have to write government-favourable narratives to receive funding, rather than appealing to what-ever minority of world-wide audience I may find?

I maintain the problem is full liberalism, not capitalism. Just like "politics" is not 'the problem', it is the system within which there is a problem, but without which we would have even more problems (unrestrained anarchy).

Are you suggesting that open trade between individuals was the cause of this demolition, rather than Stuttgart's apparently uncaring (and presumably elected) city council?

I don't have a problem with capitalism. I do have a problem with capitalism as an excuse to be amoral.

I don't have a problem with murder. But I do have a problem when it's used to kill people. 

Capitalism doesn't kill people, power kills people.

I agree with Michael, literally, in the sense that until Michael pointed out that the 'rebellious avant garde' is the system it says it attacks, I had never actually noticed.

But something I would like to pick up on is the word 'escapism'. I keep thinking of the question what would happen if any of the ideologies or countries wins: when we have that 'final situation' and 'end of history'; when then? Will we not then sit around enjoying beauty and art? Are we not fighting wars to ensure we can sit in a park and enjoy some fresh air on a spring day?

In this sense, utopian art is not even my goal. I strongly feel there are many emotions, ideas and sensations which are pleasurable to us, which we never naturally encounter except through art - in the same sense that Bach is not found naturally. I do not therefore feel that Bach is utopia or escapism: if anything, for the sake of pleasure it should be our ultimately goal to see all our sensations as not inherently 'natural' and find ourselves able to finetune them. Anybody placing flowers in their house is practicing aesthetics. What scares me about modernism in art is that it purely attacks - it seems to me that once it sheds its poison it will find no other purpose in life.

I do not feel that utopic art is my strain, nor do I favour a return to the classic era. The former presents a singular view of the future and the later tries to find beauty and order by natural laws; neither takes into account the social context and malleability of human life. Their goals are right, but their methods are wrong. I want to see art which can cope with multiple contrasting worldviews, and which can speak to me on an aesthetic level about refinement and pleasure. That is not utopic or escapism, that is the very purpose of my life. I do not seek to escape the dread of the world, I seek to supplant it. When I sing, that is not an escape from life, it is finding a higher form of life.

Modernism's paradox, I presume from this, is criticising the world for being wrong, and art for being right.

I am not sure why the player needs to 'challenge' the underlying system, or 'not accept circumstances'. Especially when the system is symbolic rather than representational.

You may have a different goal, I think, but I have never learned anything from art wilfully trying to 'challenge' me or tries to subvert my expectations. When it comes to contemporary art I have no expectations left to be subverted and experience nothing but nihilism. This is quite personal, but when I can choose between a touching story about a realistic event or someone subverting my opinion about something, I will chose the former. The former has life, beauty and wisdom to offer me because the artist is crafting a world by around me of his own positive creation. The other tries to knock down a house which is not even its own.

It really comes down to my own orientation, but I never can feel any investment in logical systems representing abstract things - let alone if these systems are trying to pull the rug out from under me. I reason that I want to feel what something is like, rather than interpret related symbols into abstract 'universal' meanings. I like how narrative games like film continue a classical tradition (of sorts), like film music is continuing the Wagnerian tradition. Connecting abstract concepts like 'married bourgeois life' to abstract game mechanics seems to me even more lifeless because now you are taking a theme which is not even explored in sincerity in games. It feels like you are subverting something which does not exist within the medium, and then 'question' it without actually exposing yourself. What do you feel our lives should be like? And can you show us interactively? Or will you just question lives as expressed in symbolic mechanics without any human life to it, seeing 'mechanics' as yet another tool to question something you do not artistically contribute to?

I would not describe (as Michaël does) showing a real universe as 'naivete' of games. I would rather say that being constructive (rather than ironic) and expressing a singular view (rather than questioning all views) as the only intellectual way forward in a post-pluralistic era, and games (and a lot of culture outside of the contemporary art circles) are lucky enough to have maintained it, even if it lacks the consistent refinement it once enjoyed. If we live in a world of multiple contradictory opinions, let us at least find reason and beauty in it.

This post is reaction and essay in one - apparently your work evokes this

Jeux pour le jeux

I like the word 'notgames' for the group, but having recently written a subsidy request for a game fund, I felt very uncomfortable writing it considering it is a game fund.

For my own current work I just say 'game' or 'art game', and then just explain that I base my work on acting and being part of a play. I think 'art game' is just shorthand, just like 'arthouse film'.

I think the word 'game' is most apt, because what we are offering is structural forms of play (in various degrees); and the word 'game' is now used for a (computer) game you purchase and play at home - which is what I am making.

...also, psah! Where is that Wagnerian spirit of just claiming the word 'game' as our own and saying we are changing games to an ultimate form?

There is a bit of magic circle. It is what prevents me from opening the developer console and cheating by enabling no-clip. It also makes me attribute value to winning or loosing, or breaking character (as Thomas alludes to).

Zimmerman recently wrote an article on Gamasutra (here) where he voices his frustration that his 'magic circle' usage had been taking on a bigger life. He even voices his exasperation at that every single student writes an attack on the magic circle even though it is never defended in the way of one binary magic circle.

I think there is a different reason as to why games have less human-enforced rules; they are usually systems in which the player fights/puzzles against the system; the player cannot subvert the system, because subversion is how he wins and failing to do so makes him 'loose' and resets the game. The player can never come to any agreement with the game, in that way. The system wins as long as it wants to be defeated; and the system looses when it asks the player to 'pretend to be Nathan Drake' as the player never before had to 'agree' anything with the game.

I agree the magic circle was plucked from Huizinga - I even feel that ever essay I read that quotes Huizinga does not strike the same tone as Huizinga did. A different era, perhaps, but certainly a different way of thinking about things.

Definitions are annoying because people use them to "prove" that something is not this or that. I have issues with Huizinga's insistence on the voluntary aspect of playing. But I refuse to interpret his definition as meaning that anything that is not done voluntarily cannot be called playing.

Though does Huizinga not use games to describe social customs and habits in the modern era, as well as jurisdiction?

I also do believe that the creative process is at root a wild thing

You should read Chaos, Territory, Art by Elizabeth Grosz!

She argues that art is a form given to fractions of the cosmos, or even only a frame around such a fraction. The artist shows a bit of the incomprehensible chaos that underlies existence, because showing all of it would drive us mad. And once in a while a spectator will "get" it. She even goes as far as saying that art might be produced purely instinctively, randomly even, with the same result. And she also claims that art is not exclusively human. That animals do it to, for instance during mating rituals when they dance for each other.

Intriguing - this seems to be the polar opposite of what I find interesting in art; creating order in the chaos and to show exemplary 'cases' of otherwise abstract or vague notions. I think this is why I am incredibly unread in more recent art, because it disagrees with me in this principal level. I would go as far as saying I value empiricism for singular order and I value the arts for their pluralistic order.

This is why I see the artist as a guide; he has something to teach to me about life. And in that sense, I feel rather nonplussed by someone offering to pull the rug from out under me and show me chaos. I would not claim that showing me the chaos is easy, rather that is just is going against my grain.

Though in an inverse way it is also arrogant of the public to be overly smug in saying that they see it 'this' way and defy any form of author intent.

I much agree with Michaël, I feel the fact you are restrained is part of what makes forms of art good - the darkened film theatre is a large part of the performance. Much like tasting the wine before a meal is a good ritual. Those elements are in a way already a game.

Of course, Mr Lynch (nor I) have any control over what you do with his art, but that does not mean we have to like your rejection of author intent, or, for that matter, the condescending 'sorry Mr. Lynch' prefacing a 'let me tell you how life works' talk about a subjective matter.

Four legs good! Two legs bad!

People complaining like this is just a sign of the airtight bubble of 'gamer culture' rapidly being brought into contact with the rest of the world. Soon we the days of 'gamer' being a identity will be gone and we can all just go back to enjoying what-ever media we like.

Maybe a shader that messes up the normal maps of all objects to make them look uneven and a bit crooked and that adds variation between multiple instances of the same model/material. And perhaps add dirt like we would add a lightmap (with a smart algorithm that knows that corners and bottoms are dirtier).

Interesting you should mention this, I had a phase where my character's model was too smooth and I just applied noise to her face and tried to restore her. The model has never been symmetrical since, too.

The dirt lightmap idea can be baked easily in 3d software, too, with the VRay example (or Mental Ray). I was actually planning to use it for my marble areas and have the dirt properly change the surface appearance.

I think the danger is that people are taking academic terms as absolute value. You could look at almost everything as 'a series of challenges' - horseriding, growing ferns, making a cup of coffee after a night in the pub - all of these are 'challenges'. But I think that just means they 'pass' the 'can be a challenge' filter in our heads. They are not really challenges in a "the fabric of the universe has challenges" type of absolutism.

As much as modernity embraced pluralism (or had to), games lag behind in this with this one-size-fits-all series of ideologies that seeps through even in academics. A model where a game is a series of challenges (or interesting choices) can be helpful, or limiting. To think of Dinner Date or Cheongsam as 'a series of challenges' is an approach which is not entirely unreasonable, but it is certainly unhelpful to me while making it, and probably unhelpful to the player while playing it.

I gave a talk yesterday and I found myself ad-libbing that other arts would laugh at the mere notion that 'making the player cry' is something hard to be angled for, because they have been doing that for centuries. Afterwards someone found many problems with what I had said, and on this she said she made some relativistic argument that for games that is an achievement, and 'in a different way', and etcetera. To which I replied (realizing) that because I have been so immersed in other arts, I cannot put on my 'game hat' any more. I had to concentrate to realize how all the words I had used were different in her head. I have had my heart broken in Les Misérables. I cannot go back to a game's idea of sad drama, as much as I can see others find it 'good enough'. (She also commented that she 'did not agree that games and art were different', which naturally I never asserted but I think was assumed because of the language I used.)

My talk was mostly about game development segregating itself and being distant from the way the other arts think, making people take ideas from other games rather than their own lives and the other arts. Someone asked me to give a 'concrete' example of how to do this, which was a difficult question. Because concretely, you should just read all the books, view all the paintings and listen to all the compositions, and be observant in life. And then sit down and write your narrative as-if it is a 6-episode BBC drama, or something similar. In my head it has become more about marrying games with the other arts by 'lending' their thoughts, rather than developing games in their own direction too much, too quickly.

The radicalism behind part of the 'finding the true game definition' probably is some smart people trying to cope with the fact that they have isolated themselves intellectually and artistically, and find they must therefore restore their confidence by saying they did this 'because that is the word of god truth of games as seen in Plato's realm of ideas.'

I like Thomas' approach to say 'activities', and I like the idea of the interactivity cycle. It really hits home with me, because it sort-of connects with my idea of symbiosis, as the player's experience of extreme involvement derives from a suspension of disbelief caused by interactivity. The idea of an interactivity cycle also fits with the idea that a 1.5 hour drama could have 1.5 hours of interactivity cycle.

I so much enjoy this full-on parody